Charcoal Joe (7 page)

At the end of Tucker Street, in a far corner of Compton, there was thick barrier of eucalyptus and avocado trees buttressed and interspersed by thorny bushes that might have been colloquially called barbed wire scrubs. Through this jungle there was a path that was barely passable. You were bound to get scratched and there were moments when a man of my height couldn't stand up straight. You definitely needed a long-sleeved jacket, and some boughs were stronger than Ox Mason.

But if you persevered for just three or four minutes you would reach a yellow door that had cracked veins of green lichen branching out here and there.

I had never been to that door without it opening before I could knock. I stood there maybe thirty seconds waiting for the yellow portal to swing inward. When it didn't oblige I rapped with my knuckles and then counted to twelve, breathing in the sharp scent of the leaf-heavy woods.

Even before she answered I knew that something was wrong, but when I saw her my concern made me forget my mission—at least for a while.

As a rule Mama Jo stood six foot three, two inches and a bit taller than I. Her stature had always been erect and unbending. Her skin was kissed by night, and her eyes were dark enough to see evil that poor mortals like me couldn't even imagine. She was nineteen years older than I, but, as a rule, no one would know that by looking at us.

That day Jo sagged and looked every one of her sixty-seven years. Sadness leaked from those barrier eyes; weakness too. She reached out for my shoulder and touched me lightly, showing none of the physical strength I knew she possessed.

“Easy?” she said. “Baby.”

She fell forward into my arms, and I held her tightly as she cried and moaned a deep and painful lament that was beyond my ken.

“It was the earth that brought you here,” she whispered.

The earth was her Goddess; not a sentient being but rather a concoction of forces that moved in mathematical precision, organizing spiders and grains of sand, human beings and clouds.

Her tears were hot on my neck, and I was reminded of the intimacy we shared twenty-nine years before in the swamplands between Texas and Louisiana.

“Baby,” she said over and over.

“Maybe we should go inside,” I suggested.

The sigh coming from her was deeper than Charcoal Joe's grumbling. She lifted up from my shoulder and I put an arm around her waist to help her into the medieval abode.

It wasn't until we were inside that I noticed that all she wore was a man's long-sleeved and navy blue dress shirt. It fit her as well as any modest dress; this was because it belonged to her son Domaque Jr. He was a monster of a man, deformed and different, with a soul as deep as his mother's and an innocence that had little use for his nearly impossible strength.

Jo was wearing that shirt because she needed love, and the love for her son was the gravity granted her by the earth spirit she revered.

The dwelling hadn't changed much. The floor was packed ocher earth. The ancient bench and alchemist's table still dominated. Small armadillos wrestled in their corner under the watchful eye of a cat that looked very much like a miniature lynx. A full-grown raven croaked at me from his shoulder-high stand and the bedding was still made from straw bound by thick hemp and coarse material. My regular chair, cobbled together from rough tree branches and animal hide, was there and the fireplace, which never emitted smoke above the forest keep, was crackling low.

The only real difference was the mantle above the hearth. The last time I was there it had been lined with thirteen candles all lit and winking. But now the previous inhabitants had returned: twelve armadillo skulls, six on each side of a man's head that had been cured in a barrel of salt for seven years after his death. Domaque Sr. yowled there. Jo had removed the macabre setting when Helen Ray, called Coco by her friends, moved in. Young, white, collegiate Coco was disturbed by the ex-lover's skull watching her and Jo writhing in passion on the straw mattress.

I moved to sit in my usual chair but Jo took me by the arm and said, “Come sit next to me on the bench, baby.”

We held each other for long minutes. She'd stopped crying but the depths of her pain thrummed in our embrace. Her sorrow leached into me. I could read it on the mantelpiece and her nakedness under that beloved shirt. I knew it when she wasn't at the door waiting for me as she always had been, and in the emptiness of the cottage that would have been in style at any time in the last thousand years—somewhere.

“Go sit in your chair, baby,” she said after our long embrace.

I did as she bade and our eyes met in the pleasant gloom of her otherworldly hideaway.

“How long she been gone?” I asked.

“Three days.”

“What happened?”

“I, I wanted a baby. I guess that was too much for her.”

“Some orphan?” I asked, being an orphan myself.

“We agreed that if there was to be a father it would be you.”

I frowned and Jo peered into me and then gasped.

“Bonnie done gone,” she said as a revelation. “Oh, baby, I'm so sorry. Here I'm such a mess I didn't see what was written on your heart.”

I never asked how Jo interpreted the world. I didn't believe in voodoo or black magic, Jesus Christ nor any of his relatives or counterparts. But even though I had my own worldview I couldn't deny that Jo knew things and did things that I could not explain.

“Can I help?” she asked me.

There was no one else in the world that could ask me that question and give me pause. Jo had power in her potions, notions, and hands. I could ask her to help me forget or maybe even how I might get Bonnie back. I could ask her anything, confident that she would never take an action that would hurt me or mine.

“No,” I said after stumbling through the corridor of those thoughts. “Bonnie's left me and that's the right thing for her. It's right for me too. I love her but her need is not me.”

Tears flowed down Mama Jo's black cheeks. I believe that she saw my truth in her own breast. This feeling was a balm because I had never before felt on equal footing with the backwoods witch.

“Then why are you here?” she whispered.

“Maybe it's that thing about the earth spirit you're always talking about.”

“But even then you had to have a reason to come,” Jo offered.

I told her the whole story of Joguye Cham and my ex.

“Hard to be angry in the face'a true love,” Jo said. “Add to that how generous Bonnie is and your heart could break three times over.”

“You know people who could take her and her husband in,” I said, “people that could hide him from whatever assassins the governments might shake out the woodwork.”

“America might grab him,” Jo agreed. “Kill him in his cell or deport him to his enemy. Money could do that in its sleep.”

“Do you know a place?”

“I do. I'll call Raymond and have him make the right moves. By Saturday morning nobody'll find them.”

“You need to call Jewelle or Jackson,” I said. “They put them somewhere safe until I got in touch with you.”

“You wanna know where I'm sendin' 'em?” Jo asked.

“No.”

She smiled and reached for me even though I was too far away to touch.

“But I need somethin' from you too,” she said.

“What's that?”

“I ran Coco outta here 'cause I loved her too much. I could see the mother in her and the changes a baby would bring out. I could feel the strength of her womanhood and the hidden mind that was sleeping inside the mind she knew. I know better than to try and wake a woman up to what she is, what she can be. But you know love's a fool; they tell you that on the radio a thousand times a day. We hear it but that don't matter. We done heard it so often that it's just sounds in the air.”

I was surprised that Jo knew anything about a radio.

Jo stopped talking and stared at the dirt floor. The raven vocalized some kind of complaint and the cat pounced on something in a corner.

After maybe three minutes I said, “You wanted me to do something for you, Jo?”

She smiled and then looked up.

“I wrote a letter,” she said.

She turned on the bench and rummaged around the jars and bottles, bunches of branches and dried dead things. Finally she came out with a stack of blue-lined school paper, maybe eighteen, twenty sheets. These she handed to me.

She had written on both sides of each sheet. Her tiny script made up two lines for each space provided. I didn't read the words.

“I been writin' it since she walked out the door,” Jo said.

“You want me to take it to her?”

“She's at that hippie house above the Sunset Strip.”

“No problem.” I folded the tome and put it in my jacket pocket.

Jo stared at me for a few long seconds.

“What else happenin' with you, Easy?”

I told her about Charcoal Joe, Mouse, and the boy they wanted me to vindicate.

“I know Rufus,” she said. “The poor man done let his soul overrun his heart.”

“As long as it doesn't overrun me,” I said.

“Would you like some tea, Easy?” she asked then. Her voice sounded as if a great weight had been lifted.

“Lipton or special?”

“It's a little potion help when the heart is all beat up,” she said. “You don't get high or nuthin', just look at things in a way that's a little more real.”

“Can I drive?”

“Oh yeah. Give you enough time and you could probably fly a jet plane.”

I liked Jo's medicines. She brewed the tea in an iron pot on her pink porcelain and black iron woodstove while we talked about little things.

“Your friend Jackson Blue come out to talk to me a week ago,” she said while handing me my tea mug.

“Oh yeah?” I said and sipped.

“He was worried that maybe Jewelle's child wasn't his.”

“What did he want from you?”

“To know if he should look for the truth.”

“And what did you say?”

“That the only truth about chirren is that they're yours if you love them.”

I drank my tea. It tasted like lemons and rhubarb steeped in wildflower honey. I didn't feel high or happy. I was the same as before and that was just fine with me.

You could walk down the main street of a tiny little town like New Iberia ten thousand times and every time you do you might see something new to you,
my father had said to me forty-one years before.
Sometimes things be different like new paint or a puppy dog in a flower garden. But many times you see things you never noticed before because, even in the smallest place, there's just too much for one man to see and remember all at once, or even in his whole lifetime.

Hauser Boulevard turns into a hill on the way from Pico up to Wilshire. I'd driven that route more times than I could remember but that day, when I got to the address Charcoal Joe had given me, I saw an orange and blue house that I'd not noticed before. Behind the house was a long staircase that led to another house that was situated between Hauser and South Ridge Drive to the east. The house was painted white, set on forty-foot stilts hoisting it high in the sky.

I had been down that street, driven past that high house a hundred times at least but I had never noticed it. Seeing it and remembering my father preparing me for that experience made his love a palpable thing; like the steering wheel under my palms. I realized then and there that Jo's tea had opened me up in such a way that all things had an equal weight.

“Who are you?” a man said in a voice that hadn't been friendly to strangers in a very long time.

I was a little surprised, not by the unfriendliness, but by the fact that I'd gotten out of the car and walked to the wire gate without really thinking about it. In my mind I was down home in Louisiana, a boy with two parents and the best food I ever ate.

“I'm here to see Jasmine Palmas-Hardy,” I said.

“I'm Uriah Hardy,” the smallish black man said.

His physique was thin and knotty; his color like copper that needed a polish.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hardy. Jasmine your wife?”

“What's it to you?” he said. He had on blue jeans faded by time, not design, and a T-shirt that had gone from white to gray.

“I'm just here to speak to the woman,” I said.

Mr. Hardy puffed up his chest and shoulders, trying, it seemed, to be taller than his five feet eight.

“What's your name?” he asked in a tone that plainly expressed that he expected a lie.

I reached into the breast pocket of my shirt, producing my PI's license for him to see.

He read the little card closely, looking at the picture and my face, comparing them suspiciously.

Handing the card back, he said, “So?”

“Your words asked me who I was,” I said. “Your tone told me that you wanted to know my business. I'm Easy Rawlins, a private detective. I'm on a case and I believe your wife has some information for me.”

“Who told you that?” he asked, making no move to open the gate.

“Man named Rufus Tyler.”

Bonnie Shay and Joguye Cham were way at the back of my mind. They were there like that house hovering up and to the left of the smaller orange and blue place guarded by Uriah.

The out-of-uniform sentry leered at me with anger and suspicion as his musket and dagger.

“What's Joe want?” Uriah asked.

“You have to ask him that yourself.”

This was not an option that the maybe-husband of Jasmine Palmas wanted to entertain.

“Listen, man,” I said. “If you're worried about me being on your property—that's okay. I'll wait here and you can go and ask Jasmine if she wants to talk, and if she wants you with her. I got time.”

“She not here,” he said. It was almost a question.

“Okay. Rufus said that she would be so I'll go back out to Venice and tell him he was wrong.” I was enjoying the banter way too much.

Uriah, maybe ten years my senior, was actually sneering, he was so upset. He was like a domestic animal cornered and slowly turning feral.

“Uriah!” a woman shouted.

We both looked to the elevated white house.

There was a black woman in an off-white dress looking down at us.

“Yeah?” the angry man answered.

“Is that Mr. Rawlins?”

He hesitated before shouting, “Yeah!”

“Let him up!”

The look Uriah Hardy gave me was not inviting, and so when he pulled the gate open I felt that I'd won a little victory. There was no pleasure in the triumph however, because I knew that this was only the first skirmish in what promised to be a great war.

There were eighty-seven steps from the street-level house up to Jasmine Palmas-Hardy's aerie. Now that I was down to one cigarette a day the climb hardly left me breathless. She was waiting on the unfinished wooden platform that was three steps down from the front door of the nosebleed house.

Also five-eight, and well formed, Jasmine was dark-skinned and handsome with almond-shaped eyes that could, I believed, say certain things while her mouth engaged in a completely different conversation. Her summer dress was sleeveless and very, very short. Her moccasins were cut from white leather.

“Mr. Rawlins?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

I presumed that Jasmine and Uriah had been married but were now separated by eighty-seven stairs instead of some legal notice. He inherited access to the street while she got the view and all the charm.

She smiled at my down-home manners and said, “Come on in.”

We entered the main room of the small house. It was a little larger than my office, sporting three doors. I assumed the portals I had not passed through led to a back exit of some sort and a bathroom. There was a red sofa and a green sofa chair perpendicular to each other and facing a glass-topped coffee table. In a far corner there hummed a squat refrigerator under a wide shelf with two hot plates, a blender, and a waffle iron. Next to the kitchen area stood a six-tiered bookcase jammed with books in every possible space and nook.

“Sofa turn into a bed?” I asked.

“You want some lemonade?” she said, her eyes smiling about the bed.

“Sure.”

“Vodka in that?”

“No, thank you.”

“Too early?”

“I gave it up.”

“Religion?”

“Life.”

Jasmine took a moment to appreciate my one-word response and then said, “Take a seat and I'll make your drink.”

I sat on the couch and she brought me a green plastic tumbler filled with frosty lemonade from the fridge. She placed my drink on the coffee table next to a red book-box that contained three full-sized volumes and a smaller book about two-thirds the height of the others. The cover read
THE FEYNMAN LECTURES ON PHYSICS
. I picked it up. It was heavier than it looked.

“Kid's book?” I asked.

“When I asked Seymour what was it that he did he gave me that book. He said it was everything any layman needed to understand the science. He called it the holy scriptures of physics. I never got past the second page but I keep it there because it reminds me of him.”

I put the collection down.

“That's the second one he give me. I loaned the first one to my girlfriend because she wanted a big red book like that on her bookshelf,” she said.

“You're a detective?” she then asked, doubt laced through the words.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Were you a cop before?”

“No.”

“Then how did you even start something like that?”

“That's a long story, Mrs. Hardy.”

“Call me Jasmine.”

“It's a long story, Jasmine, and I take it we have more important things to talk about.”

Sitting down next to me, she let her shoulders sag.

“I don't know what I'd do if they framed my son.”

“Your foster son,” I said for clarification.

“Yes.”

“Did you and Seymour live here in this house?”

“He had the bedroom and I slept out here on the fold-away.”

“One of these doors a bedroom?”

“That one,” she said, waving her hand at a pink door across from us. “First it's the toilet and on the other side is Seymour's old room.”

“Was he a good boy?”

“The best,” Jasmine said with emphasis. “I took him in when he was a baby and, and never regretted it for even one minute.”

“Then why let him go?” I asked.

The question seemed to hurt. I was thinking that the tea was bringing out something else in me; a callousness, or maybe just simple objectivity.

“I didn't want to, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “I never wanted to be parted from him. But Sy is some kinda genius and there was this science family up north in Walnut Creek. The father, mother, sister, and brother was all scientists or at least science students. They met my son at the state science fair where the mother was a judge, and after a while they decided to take him in and show him how to be what he could be.”

I did not doubt her sorrow or sacrifice.

“Have you talked to him?” I asked.

“He called me when he was arrested. He told me that he'd found the bodies and that the police arrested him for murder. That's when I called Joe and asked him to get a lawyer for Seymour.”

“Have you gone down to see Seymour?”

Her initial response was to look away, as if there was a courtroom lawyer there to tell her how to answer the question.

“They, they wouldn't let me in because I'm not blood.”

“But you were his legal guardian, right?”

Just the question was painful to her. She turned away again, made to stand, and then didn't.

“Seymour was abandoned as a baby,” she said. “He was left in a basket in front of a church where a friend of mine's husband was deacon. They didn't want to turn a poor baby over to the state orphanage so they asked me and I took him.”

I didn't believe her. But it didn't matter that she was lying. I hadn't been hired to find out where Seymour had come from.

“What about Rufus?” I asked.

“What about 'im?” The feeling in her face shifted from anguish to something ambivalent.

“How does he fit into all this?”

“He don't have nuthin' to do with Sy,” she said. “We was friends a long time ago and he knew the boy. Rufus is what you call a rough customer and so, like I said, when Sy got arrested I called him for help.”

“He told me that you spoke for him.”

“Only because'a Seymour, only because'a him.”

As we spoke, Jasmine seemed to become more vulnerable. I was aware that this vulnerability was also dangerous.

“What happened?” I asked.

“When?”

“To get your foster child arrested.”

“Um, he said, he said that he knew a woman lived out there somewhere,” she lied. “He went to the door, saw that it was open, and walked in. He called out but nobody answered. Then he found the bodies and the police came. He was gonna call the cops himself but they got there before he could.”

“You believe all that?” I asked because I had to.

“I believe that he didn't know those men or kill them, or have any idea who did.”

It was a rehearsed response but there was truth in there.

Jasmine reached behind the arm on her side of the sofa and came up with a shiny black handbag.

She reached inside. There might have been a pistol in there but I figured that I was close enough to wrest it away if I had to; besides, she had no reason to shoot me, not yet.

What she came out with was a very large stack of new bills—hundred-dollar bills.

Handing the stack to me, she said, “Eighteen thousand dollars.”

“What's this for?”

“You need it to get Sy out on bail.”

“They've given him bail?”

“The lawyer Joe got said it had somethin' to do with there bein' no witness and no weapon.”

“Why don't you go do it?”

“Rufus said I should tell you.”

I took the money. I almost always do.

Jasmine brought her left leg up on the cushion, revealing the greater part of her thigh. The movement caught my attention; the form held my eyes.

When I looked up Jasmine was staring at me. There was great feeling in her.

She stood up and said, “You like my dress?”

I looked at her shapely legs and nodded.

She turned her back to me and raised her hands high as if surrendering to the police. The hem of the dress rose up almost to her waist; she wasn't wearing anything under that.

I suppose that I have seen more lovely derrieres in my experience but I could not, and cannot, remember when.

There was something almost ceremonial about these gestures. First the money, then the woman; after all that, I could go out somewhere to die.

I rose, put my hands on her hips, and guided her down to her knees on the sofa. A few moments later I entered her. The growl that came from my lips was new to me. A moan rose from her and we started rocking back and forth.

When I pressed forward she slammed back. At some point we tumbled from the sofa to the floor, but the motion never stopped. The whole connection lasted three minutes, maybe four.

When it was over I had to tell myself not to close my eyes.

We both sat up.

“Kiss me,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just so I know that you know I'm here.”

I expected a peck but Jasmine Palmas-Hardy gave me a passionate tongue that spoke in a language beyond words and maybe even ideas.

“Will you save my son, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked after completing the kiss.

“If I don't,” I said, “then he is beyond saving.”